


violant

by Elisye



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Gen, its 4am and idk why i wrote this just take it, spoilers are alluded to if you know what they are rip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 15:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12301854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisye/pseuds/Elisye
Summary: The Watchful Assistant follows up on a disappearance.





	violant

 

"Ah, you're right on time!"

The Pianist in Rouge offers a bright smile. You hesitate to return the smile in its wide eagerness, simply taking her outstretched hand, wincing internally as your nerves become so painfully obvious. By either fortune or pity - probably pity, definitely pity, it can only be that - she doesn't comment on it and merely giggles as you give a fleeting kiss to the knuckles in greeting. Nothing but a structured show of courtesy.

"Do you have another recital after this?"

"Nope." She hums. "You really came at a perfect time."

Relief drops heavy on your shoulders. You can practically feel your bones slant and droop in a sharp movement. "Then, about what I asked..."

"Of course."

Her gloved hands wander across a vanity table. Tinted perfume bottles and round powder tins are scattered across the wood as she looks for an ink-pot buried somewhere, hidden among unlabeled tinctures and misleadingly-labeled tinctures. She finds the ink next to an empty flask of laudanum, and then proceeds to pull out a fresh feather and a notepad from a small compartment under the desk. Your hands, still a bit sweaty and anxious, twist idly around the glass neck of a bottle that you brought with you - one among a dozen, really. It's just the only one that manages to stick out from under the flap of your messenger bag.

"Here you go!" The Pianist tears off the note she had been scribbling, a laugh tucked into the back of her words, and gives it to you. Her wonderful smile grows ten-told after you stuff the paper into a coat pocket and open your bag to return the courtesy. Her hands are already scrambling to take what she only deserves for her kindness.

"Thank you for your help."

"Oh, no problem. No problem at all!" The laugh finally bubbles to the surface, making the foundation flake away into dark circles. You can only wonder about what happened to the soothing goldfish she got a few weeks back. (Nothing good, of course, if she's back to being a laudanum addict for her nightmares.)

You turn quickly on your heel, and continue with your work.

 

 

 

 

"Oh, him. I know where he is."

The parlor room is a suffocating place. A scent and a weight, clogging the air with a rot that threatens to creep into your clothes for days without end. You wonder, for a moment, why so - you're not visiting a Tomb Colonist, for goodness sake. And a cursory drag of your finger over the table gathers no dust, so it can't be from a sheer lack of care either. Truly odd, really. One would think that a member of high society would be deeply concerned about appearances, but it seems the Mysterious Amnesiac is an exception to expectations.

(Makes sense. _He_ likes to seek out the unusual and unpredictable.)

"If it isn't too much to ask for - please tell me everything you know."

"Of course, of course." His eyes crinkle with softness around the edges. "Last I heard, he moved to the Flit."

"Up there again?" The words spill out of their own accord, tinged with a coarse weariness. Places like that, along with ground-hugging Spite, did not favor your stick-figure constitution and absolute lack of stamina.

The Amnesiac leans over to give you a comforting pat on the shoulder. "As long as you're determined, one can do anything - so it will be fine. That's what I learnt, at least."

"Learnt...?" You ask, and you repeat, and you almost hit yourself with your own notepad. Why did you ask that? You already—

"Well, I _think_ I learnt that, at some point." He crosses his arms across his chest, humming lightly, quizzically. There is a simmering focus in his eyes now. "When was it, I wonder. Perhaps some time before I died? Or when I played with the ferryman? I feel like it might be the latter, but..."

Another short, withering hum. But it helps no one - he shakes a hand through his hair eventually, messing it up, looking close to wanting to pull a few strands out by the roots. Even if you've never experienced amnesia before and would never want to, watching an actual amnesiac rake through the broken figments of his memories and the remaining mess called his life, it is incredibly easy to be sympathetic, empathetic, and a tad afraid of doubting oneself.

(Poor Kaede. She must have tried. But it's been some time already, and Rantarou still hasn't remembered a single thing that he didn't need to be told and retold. With the circumstances, perhaps, it would be best not to clarify that she was the one who likely said those words first.)

You bow your head a bit at your own quiet thoughts. "...Thank you for the information. I shouldn't keep imposing."

"Oh, no—" The Amnesiac is back to his carefree smiles and cheers, already forgoing that fading, forgettable past. "It was good to meet you. Do come over some more - I barely have visitors, these days."

You consider never coming back. That's the easiest decision, sometimes. "I'll consider it."

 

 

 

 

One day, just one day -

These ropeways will kill you.

Not truly, of course, because death is a difficult concept to apply in this city - but for the liberal and the progressive, death doesn't have to mean the halt of physical functioning.

"Your face is just priceless right now, you know."

You grit your teeth as the voice laughs, more real and more free, more of a song than the pieces played by your musical contact from Mahogany Hall. The bridge shakes as much as your faith and your heart as you try to look below at the boy, though you only manage it for a second before you feel like you're going retch the longer your mind has to comprehend the spatial attributes of heights. Watching you be valiant, your target laughs again - louder, swinging his legs like death doesn't really matter. Not even true death.

"Really, how long has it been?" The Lying Pickpocket asks aloud - to you and to everyone and to no one. You don't need to look at him to know he must be smiling whimsically at his own thoughts. "You've been down here for... a few years, at least? And you're still afraid of heights."

"I prefer not to have 'death by blunt force trauma to the head' written into my medical history." You almost yell that out, really. But don't, just hissing instead, as a sudden breeze picks up and you focus on hanging onto the bridge for dear life. Even if you weren't busy with that, though, you'd only be thinking of trivial things - like why you, why this, why were you told to complete your apprenticeship in London, of all the places in the world? It would be a justifiable thing if you were told to shadow, say, the Implacable Detective, or to simply work with one of the better detectives of this fallen city, but you're not even doing that. No, you're simply here. And somehow, that's supposed to be beneficial.

You find yourself sighing before you can help it. The Pickpocket doesn't notice. Or maybe he did and—

The ropeway shudders. You swallow something, maybe a quaint sound or your last scream, as the bridge dips in a downward angle with the footsteps of a new occupant. But as light as his tread is, the rope and the warped panels keep shaking, everything too old and too worn and perfectly ready to snap before your eyes at a heartbeat's call. Not for the first time, you think, you hate the Flit. You really, really hate that there are actual people who live across these rickety, perilous rooftops - where thieves and criminals stretch their legs and their arms like a web, where rats and their fellowship hide and degrade, where some people have no choice but to live because the Neath is just not that kind.

A hand, gentle as a lie, covers one of your own. You blink, almost-unseeing, at the boy grinning up at you. It comes by instinct, by habit, unthinkingly - you let your fingers become entwined with his, locked together, a little lovers' pact. He begins to pull you along, slow and steady, and you try hard not to think about the smog in the air. How it curls and breathes and tries to swallow the two of you into some kind of mystery.

In mere moments, you find yourself on a more solid - or at least, less likely to give way to your first death - surface. Just like that, the moment is done. The warmth of his hand is gone. You find yourself more disappointed than you ought to be.

"Well?" The Pickpocket voices, his arms leisurely crossed behind his back. He's still grinning, but there's more teeth to the expression - he wants to be repaid for the favor, small as it was, eventually. "What do you want? Don't tell me that you did this just to get your hat back - it'd be a bad lie, and wouldn't I know about lies the best?"

You purse your lips as you consider your response. In the beginning, it really was just to get your hat back. And your wallet, but that got returned after a handful of cat-and-dog chases around the backstreets of Veilsgarden. Your hat still hasn't been returned, probably won't be and perhaps can't be, and for all the time and the effort that has been wasted in vain so far - this long course seems to be something to abandon inevitably. But the odds have rolled an odder set of dice, and you're here, still here, he's here, still here. So now, the reason is...

You sigh again. "Give my hat back, Kokichi."

"Hey, didn't I just say—"

The words falter, halt, die - in about ten heartbeats or so, his mouth eventually clamping shut and his eyebrows furrowed together. You can almost empathize with the feeling he might be having. You've been on the receiving end of such surprise, a vice-versa scenario and a reversed situation, sometimes much too often.

"You know my name. My _real_ name."

However quiet, the disbelief echoes. You fidget with a few strands of your fringe. "I— I _am_ a detective, even if I'm still in training."

He continues to look at you, up and down. You almost want to ask what he's trying to find - the truth? A lie? For whether you mean anything at all, whether you're worth believing? (A part of you likes to whisper, as you dream of being watched and as you dream of a chess game - you already decided to believe in him, somehow. So why won't he do the same for you? That has a simple answer, however.)

You blink. In that instant, the Pickpocket spins on the balls of his feet, hops off an edge, and slides down the slanting roofs and rusting walls into a sea of pin-prick lights and dark fog. Running away, because that has always been his choice for an answer to anything. It's utterly regrettable.

But as long as true death never follows, the two of you will meet again. A disappearance is nothing but a goodbye without the farewells. That's all you got every time, for next time. That's all you got now.

 


End file.
